Analysis of 89 deaths of minors finds 39% drove vehicles laden with explosives, while a third died as foot soldiers

Islamic
State has been dispatching children and teenagers into battle and
sending them as suicide bombers at an unprecedented rate, analysis by US
researchers has found.

Examining Isis death notices of 89 children and youths on Twitter and the encrypted communications app Telegram,
a study by Georgia State University found that the minors came from at
least 14 nationalities, with just under two-thirds aged between 12 and
16.

According to the analysis,
which ran from the start of 2015 until the end of January this year,
the death rate has doubled for those aged 18 and under being used by
Isis. Overall, 39% of them were used to drive cars or trucks laden with
explosives at the enemy. A further 33% died as foot soldiers.There
were three times as many suicide operations involving children and
youth in January 2016 as the previous January, the researchers found.

“The
Islamic State has so heavily championed the mobilisation of children –
on a scale rarely associated even with violent extremist organisations –
that it suggests organisational concerns that far outweigh short-term
propaganda benefits,” the report said.

The report’s co-author
Charlie Winter said what surprised him was that Isis was not using
children in a way that substantially differed from adult soldiers. “The
way children are being used is perhaps counterintuitive in the context
of child soldier precedence. They aren’t just being used to buoy the
ranks of Isis nor are they being used in roles that adults can’t engage
in,” he said.

“Children and youth don’t really receive any special
treatment from Isis propagandists. They’re celebrated in exactly the
same way adults are. And they’re celebrated alongside adults rather than
being given any recognition for their age … It’s almost an incidental
fact.”

Although explicit information on age from Isis sources was
scant, Winter said the researchers were cautiously using child
development theory guidelines to classify subjects and that all those in
the sample used were believed to be 18 or under.

Examining the
location of where children died against their given nationalities,
Winter said many appeared to have been imported into conflict in Iraq from bordering Syria.

The
survey from Georgia State University academics analyzed 89 images of
children and youth who the extremist group said had been killed while
carrying out militant operations between Jan. 1, 2015 and Jan. 31, 2016.

These
children were among some 1,500 young people that the militants have
enlisted to fight, said Mia Bloom, one of the study authors. She
estimated that there are likely thousands more children who are being
indoctrinated by the militants and could serve as potential recruits.

"This
study is hinting at the fact that the problems are much greater than we
ever imagined,” Bloom said of the report, published Friday by CTC
Sentinel, the journal of the military academy West Point's Counter
Terrorism Center.

The study finds 21 children died in suicide
attacks using explosive-packed vehicles in the first seven months of
2015 -- two and a half times the previous estimate. In
fact, the rate of child casualties seems to be accelerating. Last
January, six children died in suicide operations for the militant group.
This January, the toll rose to 11 children, and the number of suicide
bombings involving children tripled from a year ago.

“People mean a lot of
different things by it,” she told MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell. “You
could also call Bernie Sanders a New Deal Democrat and you wouldn’t be
wrong. And maybe he’s not even a very left-wing New Deal Democrat.”

Piven,
a professor of sociology and political science for the Graduate Center
at the City University of New York, observed that people are “eating up”
Sanders’ policy ideas, which she described as unique to the American
left-wing.

“The younger voters, when you poll them on this word
‘Socialism,’ it is not a bad word,” O’Donnell said. “Polls always used
to return Socialism as just about the worst word that you could
associate with them.”

That negative connotation, Piven said, was
the outcome of propaganda and jingoism in popular culture. But at its
root, she added, “Democratic Socialism” means that there should be
democratic control of the economy’s main functions.

In several hundred cases patients have been seriously and often permanently damaged

One
of my teachers in medical school kept saying: ‘A treatment that has no
side-effects is already a good one.’ These seemed to be wise words worth
remembering. But today I think he may have been not entirely correct:
there is no therapy that does not have potential to cause adverse
effects. What really counts, in life as in medicine, is a reasonable
balance between risk and benefit.

Chiropractic treatment is an
excellent example of the importance of this balance. Chiropractors rely
heavily on manipulating their patients’ spines, and the benefits are not
at all clear. Practitioners usually insist that their manipulations are
effective for a bafflingly wide range of conditions. On the internet,
for instance, it is hard to find an illness that chiropractors do not
claim to cure. However, the published evidence generally reveals these
claims to be little more than wishful thinking. Therefore, even
relatively minor side-effects might tilt the risk/benefit balance into
the negative.

There is now a lot of evidence showing that more
than half of all patients suffer mild to moderate adverse effects after
seeing a chiropractor. These are mostly local and referred pains that
usually last for two to three days. Chiropractors often claim that these
are necessary steps on the road to getting better. On a good day, we
might even believe them.

But unfortunately there is more, much
more. Several hundred cases have been documented in which patients were
seriously and often permanently damaged after chiropractic
manipulations. The latest to hit the headlines was that of a 32-year-old
woman from Jakarta who died after being treated by an American
chiropractor. What usually happens in these tragic instances is that,
upon manipulation of the upper spine, an artery supplying the brain is
over-stretched and simply breaks up, leading to a stroke which can prove
fatal.

Chiropractors do not like to hear any of this, and either
claim that these are extremely rare events, or deny any connection with
their manipulations. Regrettably, the hard evidence is not as solid as
one would wish. In conventional medicine we have effective systems to
monitor adverse effects of all interventions — not so in alternative
medicine. Therefore, the true frequency of such tragedies is anyone’s
guess. About 30 deaths after chiropractic have been documented in
medical literature, but they are probably just the tip of a much bigger
iceberg. We have shown, for instance, that in the UK the under-reporting
of such instances is very close to 100 per cent.

Cambridge
academic’s new book disputes that atheism is a ‘modern invention’ and
sets out evidence that ‘disbelief in the supernatural is as old as the
hills’

Atheism
is not a modern invention from the western Enlightenment, but actually
dates back to the ancient world, according to a new book by a Cambridge
academic – which challenges the assumption that humanity is naturally
predisposed to believe in gods.

In Battling the Gods, Tim
Whitmarsh, professor of Greek culture at Cambridge University, lays out a
series of examples showing that atheism existed in polytheistic ancient
Greece. It is, according to its author, partly “an attempt to excavate
ancient atheism from underneath the rubble heaped on it by millennia of
Christian opprobrium”.

Whitmarsh, a fellow of St John’s College,
believes that the growing trend towards seeing religion as “hardwired”
into humans is deeply worrying. “I am trying to destabilise this notion,
which seems to be gaining hold all the time, that there is something
fundamental to humanity about [religious] belief,” he told the Guardian.

His
book disputes that atheism is “a modern invention, a product of the
European Enlightenment” and a mode of thought that “would be
inconceivable without the twin ideas of a secular state and of science
as a rival to religious truth”.

It is a myth, he writes, which is
“nurtured by both sides of the ‘new atheism’ debate. Adherents wish to
present scepticism toward the supernatural as the result of science’s
progressive eclipse of religion, and the religious wish to see it as a
pathological symptom of a decadent western world consumed by capitalism.

“Both
are guilty of modernist vanity. Disbelief in the supernatural is as old
as the hills. It is only through profound ignorance of the classical
tradition that anyone ever believed that 18th-century Europeans were the
first to battle the gods.”

“We tend to see atheism as an idea
that has only recently emerged in secular western societies. The
rhetoric used to describe it is hyper-modern. In fact, early societies
were far more capable than many since of containing atheism within the
spectrum of what they considered normal,” said Whitmarsh.

From Robert Reich:http://robertreich.org/post/139385548525Robert ReichMonday, February 15, 2016I’m writing to you today to announce the death of the Republican Party. It is no longer a living, vital, animate organization.

It died in 2016. RIP.

It has been replaced by warring tribes:

Evangelicals opposed to abortion, gay marriage, and science.

Libertarians opposed to any government constraint on private behavior.

Group of activists barges in on faculty meeting, calls Jewish professor ‘Zionist pig,’ demands end to ‘racist’ classes

Approximately
10 Brooklyn College students who interrupted a faculty meeting called
for “Zionists off campus” among its list of demands. A
faculty member at the Tuesday afternoon meeting told JTA that along
with the demand on Zionists, the students called one faculty member a
“Zionist pig.” The educator who spoke to JTA wished to remain anonymous.

Other demands ranged from calls for better pay for adjunct teachers to ending “racist” class offerings.Some
of the faculty members at the meeting applauded during the students’
vocal protests, but it was not clear as to which demands the teachers
were reacting to.

The faculty member also told JTA that when
computer science professor and faculty council head Yedidyah Langsam
told the students they were “out of order,” they called him a “Zionist
pig.”In a news release issued Tuesday, Brooklyn state Assemblyman
Dov Hikind said he received complaints after the meeting from “dozens”
of faculty members.

“It’s just an absolute disgrace that something like this would happen in our own community,” Hikind said.

Hikind
also called on CUNY Chancellor James Milliken to “implement a plan of
action to prevent this kind of intimidation and disruption from
reoccurring anywhere within CUNY.”

Much of SJW's passion goes into speech and culture policing directed at victimless crimes that violate their moral taboos

The
modern social justice movement, or the new “political correctness,”
vaulted into the spotlight last year. Student protests swept across
campuses with demands often focused on purging thoughtcrime—leading to
heated debates on whether this movement is a dangerous
pseudo-progressive authoritarianism or a long-overdue effort to achieve
justice for all. A year-in-review piece in The Daily Dot in late December proclaimed 2015 “the year of the social justice warrior.”

The Daily Dot author,
graduate student and political columnist Michael Rosa, hailed this
trend and urged liberals to “embrace the term.” Yet the accomplishments
he invoked are, as the social justice crowd likes to say, problematic.
His Exhibit A, the legalization of same-sex marriage, actually had very
little to do with the current social justice movement; it was the result
of two decades of very different, pragmatic activism that focused on a
clear goal—the legal right to marry—and stressed equality, not gay
identity. And #BlackLivesMatter, also a movement with a specific
focus—police violence toward African-Americans—has been arguably hurt,
not helped, by PC dogma that suppresses discussion of thorny issues such as black-on-black crime and attacks “insensitive” dissenting speech (Amherst protesters demanded disciplinary action against students who had put up “All Lives Matter” posters).

Unfortunately,
Mr. Rosa’s other examples of “social justice” in action—the feminist
revival, the new visibility of transgender issues and opposition to
“Islamophobia”—are squarely in train-wreck territory. Not that there’s
anything wrong with the principles: Most Americans support gender
equality, believe transgender people should be able to live as they wish
and reject anti-Muslim hate. But social justice warriors have turned
these causes into malignant self-parody. Their feminism frets over men sitting with their legs apart on public transit, seeks dissent-free “safe spaces” and cries oppression at concern about obesity’s health risks. Their transgender advocacy demands respect for customized gender identities with personal pronouns that may change on a whim and crucifies a devoutly progressive filmmaker for a “transphobic” joke that presumes that female characters are anatomically female. Their anti-Islamophobia trashes feminist critics of conservative Islamism and victim-blames journalists murdered for publishing Mohammed cartoons.

Have
the social justice warriors of 2015 supported some worthy causes? Sure.
But much of their passion goes into speech and culture policing
directed at victimless crimes that violate their moral taboos.

Consider last year’s protest
against a Boston Museum of Fine Arts exhibit that allowed visitors to
try on a kimono: Activists assailed this as “cultural appropriation” and
racist imperialism, much to the bafflement of local Japanese-Americans and Japanese consulate staffers. Or consider the outcry over a T-shirt worn in promotional photos by stars of the film Suffragette, using a slogan from suffragist Emmeline Pankhurst, “I’d rather be a rebel than a slave.” This was blasted for “co-opting” the black experience of slavery and racism and ignoring
the Civil War connotations of “rebel”—even though the quote had nothing
to do with American slavery or Confederate rebellion and used both
words in the universal sense.

Behind these outbreaks of
self-righteous wrath is a distinct if somewhat amorphous ideology we
could dub “SocJus.” (The callback to “IngSoc” from George Orwell’s 1984
is not quite coincidental.) At the center of this worldview is the evil
of oppression, the virtue of “marginalized” identities—based on race,
ethnicity, gender, sexuality, religion or disability—and the
perfectionist quest to eliminate anything the marginalized may perceive
as oppressive or “invalidating.” Such perceptions are given a
near-absolute presumption of validity, even if shared by a fraction of
the “oppressed group.” Meanwhile, the viewpoints of the “privileged”—a
category that includes economically disadvantaged whites, especially
men—are radically devalued.

Because SocJus is so focused on
changing bad attitudes and ferreting out subtle biases and
insensitivities, its hostility to free speech and thought is not an
unfortunate byproduct of the movement but its very essence. You can be
welcoming and respectful toward transgender people yet still be branded a
bigot if you don’t quite believe that transwomen who identify as female
but have an intact male anatomy are “real women”—and even if you keep
that opinion to yourself, you can be challenged to prove your loyalty to the party line.

Speaking
on the Rita Cosby Show, Cuban talked in depth about the GOP candidate
field. The Texas senator, he said, reminds him of a “reincarnate” of
infamous Joe McCarthy, a Wisconsin senator made famous for communist
witch hunts during the Cold War.

“[H]e assigns labels to himself
and he tries to live up to those labels,” Cuban said. “He assigns labels
the others, you know, and denigrates people who don’t, who aren’t pure
in how they are. I just, you know, I keep on waiting for him to say
something to the effect, you know, are you or have you ever been a
member of some party?”

Cuban said he believes Cruz, who has led
efforts to shut down the government over disagreements with President
Barack Obama in the past, is an obstructionist and not constructive.

“I
just think that he doesn’t, he’s not the type of person who will
accomplish anything,” Cuban said. “He’s just obstructionist and he
really, you know and Paul Ryan says it best, you know, that the
Republican Party needs to go from being obstructionist, to get, to be
one of propositions rather than opposition. And Ted Cruz embodies pure
opposition without proposition.”

He also voiced concerns about Cruz’s ability to get anything done, if elected.

“Where
he’s been able to say, you know what, I was able to get this done,” he
said. “I was able to get people to vote with me and for me, and we were
able to accomplish A, B and C. That’s just a blank slate. And then when
you talk to his peers, you get to see that they won’t support him.”

Global scarcity of key life source far worse than thought, new study finds

A new analysis
reveals that global water scarcity is a far greater problem than
previously thought, affecting 4 billion people—two-thirds of the world's
population—and will be "one of the most difficult and important
challenges of this century."

Previous analyses looked at water
scarcity at an annual scale, and had found that water scarcity affected
between 1.7 and 3.1 billion people. The new study, published Friday in
the journal Science Advances, assessed water scarcity on a monthly basis, more fully capturing the specific times of year when it could be an issue.

"Water
scarcity has become a global problem affecting us all," stated study
co-author Arjen Hoekstra, a professor of water management at the
University of Twente in the Netherlands.

The study found that
almost half of the 4 billion affected by severe water scarcity for a
month or more are in India and China. Millions of others affected live
in Bangladesh, Nigeria, Pakistan, and Mexico.

The United States is
far from immune to the problem, with 130 million people affected by
water scarcity for at least one month a year, mostly in the states of
Texas, California, and Florida. And among the rivers the study notes
that are fully or nearly depleted before reaching their end is the
Colorado River in the West.

There are also half a billion people who face severe water scarcity year round, the analysis found.
From study:

Direct
victims of the overconsumption of water resources are the users
themselves, who increasingly suffer from water shortages during
droughts, resulting in reduced harvests and loss of income for farmers,
threatening the livelihoods of whole communities. Businesses depending
on water in their operations or supply chain also face increasing risks
of water shortages. Other effects include biodiversity losses, low flows
hampering navigation, land subsidence, and salinization of soils and
groundwater resources.

The study concludes that
"[m]eeting humanity’s increasing demand for freshwater and protecting
ecosystems at the same time. . . will be one of the most difficult and
important challenges of this century."

The new publication follows a pair of NASA studies
led by researchers from the University of California Irvine that showed
that the impacts of global warming along with growing demand has caused
the world's water supply to drop to dangerous levels.

I
don’t like being bothered or bossed around. I hated that anyone, for
any reason, could interrupt my life, and I could interrupt my life just
the same

The
phone rings: it’s my friend checking to see if I can pick her up on the
way to a dinner party. I ask her where she is and as she explains, I
reach as far as I can across the countertop for a pen. I scribble the
address in my trusty notebook I keep in my back pocket. I tell her I’ll
be at her place in about 20 minutes, give or take a few. Then I hang up.
Literally.

I physically take the handset receiver away from my
ear and hang it on the weight-triggered click switch that cuts off my
landline’s dial tone.

I take my laptop, Google the address, add
better directions to my notes and head outside to my 1989 pick-up truck
(whose most recent technological feature is a cassette player) and drive
over. If I get lost on the way, I’ll need to ask someone for
directions. If she changes her plans, she won’t be able to tell me or
cancel at a moment’s notice. If I crash on the way, I won’t be calling
911.

I’m fine with all of this. As you guessed by now, I haven’t had a cellphone for more than 18 months.
I
didn’t just cancel cellular service and keep the smartphone for Wi-Fi
fun, nor did I downgrade to a flip phone to “simplify”; I opted out
entirely. There is no mobile phone in my life, in any form, at all.

Arguably,
there should be. I’m a freelance writer and graphic designer with many
reasons to have a little computer in my holster, but I don’t miss it.
There are a dozen ways to contact me between email and social media.
When I check in, it’s on my terms. No one can interrupt my bad singing
of Hooked on a Feeling with a text message. It’s as freeing as the first
night of a vacation.

“My phone” has become “the phone”. It’s no
longer my personal assistant; it has reverted back to being a piece of
furniture – like “the fridge” or “the couch”, two other items you also
wouldn’t carry around on your butt.

I didn’t get rid of it for
some hipster-inspired luddite ideal or because I couldn’t afford it. I
cut myself off because my life is better without a cellphone. I’m less
distracted and less accessible, two things I didn’t realize were far
more important than instantly knowing how many movies Kevin Kline’s been
in since 2010 at a moment’s notice. I can’t be bothered unless I choose
to be. It makes a woman feel rich.

Yet,
what was perhaps most painful for many of us is that we value and
embrace much of the good work of these activists and organizers. They
are some of our nation's leading advocates, working to secure justice
and fair treatment to all. Often they stand as allies in our work for
justice and equality.

Unfortunately, though, this fissure is not a
new experience. Since starting as the CEO of ADL last summer, I
personally have heard from many college students that their Jewish faith
renders them pariahs on their campuses -- unless and until they
affirmatively denounce Israel.

Campus Hillels and other Jewish
organizations that have long worked with LGBTQ campus groups, student of
color organizations, and other progressive clubs on campus to host film
festivals, panels, and other events increasingly are being shut out,
rejected from participating, even when Israel is not on the agenda.
Where other students are not being subjected to a litmus test on their
views on Israel, Jewish students have been singled out and questioned about their objectivity and position on the issue.

As
racial tensions flared across the country the past few years, we heard
anecdotes from Jewish racial justice advocates that they were called
"kikes" or targeted with other anti-Jewish slurs. When they tried to
address the epithets, they were told they need to understand that "it's
because of Israel."Here's the thing, though. It's not. It's anti-Semitism.

Let's
be clear. No government is immune from criticism. Surely neither the
U.S. government nor the government of Israel nor any other. Indeed, we
have criticized policies and practices of Israeli leadership when we felt appropriate to do so.

We
recognize that anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian activists will condemn
Israel. That is a reality. That is their right. We disagree - vigorously
- with their accusations of pinkwashing,
with claims that Israel is an apartheid state, and with other efforts
to demonize Israel. And we will speak out, challenge their
mischaracterizations, and dismantle their indictments with facts and
truths, as is our right.

But when that criticism of Israel crosses
the line into anti-Semitism, we will condemn it. It is unacceptable and
cannot be tolerated anywhere, especially not in social justice circles.
To be specific, when a person conflates Jews, Israelis, and the Israeli
government, it is anti-Semitic. When all Jews and all Israelis are held
responsible for the actions of the Israeli government, it is
anti-Semitic. When Jews would be denied the right to self-determination
accorded to all other peoples, it is anti-Semitic.

And when
protesters chant "Palestine will be free from the river to the sea," it
is appropriately interpreted by most people as a call for the erasure of
Israel - and it is anti-Semitic. Giving protestors the benefit of the
doubt, it is unlikely that most intend their message to be anti-Semitic.
However, regardless of the intent of the protest, the impact matters.

Yet,
too often, when students, individuals, or organizations raise the
specter of anti-Semitism it is quickly rejected, disregarded, or written
off. Israel's critics literally have written best-selling books decrying their so-called inability to criticize Israel.

Indeed,
we know that women are best positioned to define sexism, people of
color to define racism, and LGBTQ people to define homophobia,
transphobia, and heterosexism. But, does this mean that all women must
reach consensus on what offends them? All people of color? Everyone in
LGBTQ communities? Hardly.

So too, we Jews are best situated to
define anti-Semitism, even if all of us may not likely reach consensus
on the definition. Our millennial experience with intolerance demands
the same acknowledgement as other forms of bigotry. Indeed, it is the
collective responsibility of activists and organizers across the
ideological spectrum to stop and listen when someone says, "You've
crossed the line."

Standing up for rights of disempowered people is a job for us all. ADL has been doing it for more than 100 years.
But marginalizing and wounding others in the process helps no one.
Rather, it divides us and impedes our ability to find common ground in
places where our collective strength could do so much good.

College
students have risen up to fight racism on campuses across the country.
But it is often those very same students who subject Jewish students to
anti-Semitism.

When
Arielle Mokhtarzadeh and Ben Rosenberg arrived at University of
California, Berkeley on November 6 to attend the annual Students of
Color Conference, they had no way of knowing that they would be leaving
as victims of anti-Semitism.

The University of California Student
Association’s “oldest and largest conference,” the Students of Color
Conference (SOCC) has maintained a reputation for 27 years as being a
“safe space” where students of color, as well as white progressive
allies, can address and discuss issues of structural and cultural
inequality on college campuses. Students who attend are encouraged to be
cognizant of their language while exploring topics that directly affect
students from marginalized communities: the school-to-prison pipeline,
sexual violence, decreased funding to ethnic and LGBT studies
departments, racially insensitive speech, and perhaps most importantly, a
“disquieting trend” of hate crimes on university campuses statewide.

It
was this disquieting, yet growing, trend of hate speech and crimes
directed towards Jewish students within the UC system that spurred
Mokhtarzadeh and Rosenberg, both Jewish sophomores at UCLA, to attend
the conference. Their freshman year was punctuated by incidents of
anti-Semitism that were both personal and met with national controversy.
They were shocked during their first quarter in school, when students
entered the Bruin Cafe to see the phrase “Hitler did nothing wrong” etched into a table. Months later, Mokhtarzadeh’s friend, Rachel Beyda, was temporarily denied
a student government leadership position based solely on her Jewish
identity, an event that made news nationwide. Throughout the year, they
saw the school’s pro-Palestinian group, Students for Justice in
Palestine (SJP), issue criticism of Israel that overstepped into
anti-Semitic rhetoric and hate. The campus was supposed to be their new
home, their new safe space—so why didn’t they feel that way?

Mokhtarzadeh
applied to the Students of Color Conference with the hope “of learning
more about the experiences of communities of color at the UC… [and]
sharing with those communities the experience of my own,” she told me.
As an Iranian Jew, she believed her identity as both a religious and
ethnic minority granted her a place to belong and thrive at the SOCC.
Rosenberg (who requested a pseudonym so that he could speak freely about
campus issues without fear of potential retaliation) said that growing
up in the Bay Area had taught him to be an active member of social
justice movements and progressive communities. “I was always encouraged
to take initiative on issues and movements that didn’t directly affect
me,” he said. “I wanted to learn more about the struggles that my fellow
students were going through.”

But their experiences as Jewish
students at the SOCC would soon inspire a rude awakening: the campus
progressives who were fighting for justice on college campuses for
students of color weren’t only ignoring anti-Semitism and attacks on
Jewish identity—they were sometimes the ones perpetuating it.

This
was quickly made clear on the first day at a session called “Existence
is Resistance,” hosted by leaders of UC San Diego’s SJP chapter.
Students discussed the boycott of Israel as an issue of urgency for
students of color. Rosenberg and Mokhtarzadeh told me that they
originally had no intention to engage in dialogue about Israel at the
conference, but they were horrified at how attacks on Israel soon
devolved into attacks on the Jews. “The session went way beyond the
boundaries of what was appropriate or truthful at the SOCC,”
Rosenberg recalled.

Tuesday, February 9, 2016

This subhead contains as many active ingredients as your sugar pill

By Jennifer Harrison, Science OfficerFebruary 3, 2016

Homeopathy is an alternative medicine, which means a few things. It means it’s not medicine, it’s an alternative;
it means it’s seen by many as somehow better and healthier than modern
medicines; and it means that people are incredibly emotional in their
support for it.I’ve received death threats pretty much every time I’ve
ever written about homeopathy, which is incredible if you think about
it. How can a remedy cause so much hatred? And what could I possibly say
that would make people upset? Well, it doesn’t work. Homeopathy is a
£40 million industry in the UK and it doesn’t even work. I once deliberately overdosed on homeopathic sleeping pills. I ate the whole tube, about a month’s worth. I did fall asleep but it was 10 hours later and at bedtime.

Like cures like

Many
alternative medicines are a bit silly. Crystal healing anyone? However,
none are as frustratingly absurd as homeopathy. There are not one but
two unbelievable aspects of homeopathy that people are often unaware of,
the first being like cures like. Homeopathy was invented in
1796 by a German named Samuel Hahnemann. He believed that you could
treat and cure illnesses by using substances that cause the symptoms of
the illness in healthy people.

If you had insomnia, a suitable
substance would be caffeine. Caffeine will keep healthy people awake but
if you’re unable to get to sleep then according to homeopathy, it will
help you. You can buy homeopathic remedies on the high street that
supposedly contain caffeine to help you sleep. And worse, Reddit user
papafree claims to have used dangerous and hilarious ingredients while
working in a homeopathic manufacturing plant according to this entertaining and disturbing thread.

No active ingredients

Homeopathic
remedies come as water or a sugar pill. There are no other ingredients.
If you take a remedy for curing insomnia and another for treating the
cold and mixed them up, nobody on Earth could figure out which was
which. Every test of the pill’s composition would find only sugar. Every
study of patients taking the pills would reveal no difference because
they are identical pills. There are no active ingredients in homeopathy.

As if Hahnemann’s belief of like cures like
wasn’t weird enough, he felt that the more you diluted the substance
the more effective it was. This almost makes sense at first because his
ingredients were chosen to make symptoms worse (e.g. caffeine for
insomnia), so using less of the ingredient would obviously give better
results than more. But Hahnemann took it further, introducing the Law of
Infinitesimals.

If you take one drop of your ingredient and dilute it
in 99 drops of water, you’ve got 1 centesimal. If you take one drop
from this solution and mix it into another 99 drops of water, you’ve got
2 centesimals written as 2C. With each further dilution, you very
quickly lose the initial ingredient. Remedies are frequently sold at a
30C dilution. At that dilution you could buy enough of the product to
fill the entire solar system and not find a single molecule of the original ingredient. You’re more likely to win the lottery five weeks running than find a single molecule of active ingredient in your remedy from Boots.

In
a wide-ranging conversation, the journalist and climate activist
discusses the recent Paris climate accords, the politics of global
warming, climate change denial and environmental justice.

A
week and a half ago, just as a blizzard was barreling up the East
Coast, I traveled to my hometown, Canandaigua, NY, and before a
standing-room-only audience of more than 400 at Finger Lakes Community
College, had a conversation with author and climate activist Naomi
Klein.

Our talk was part of the George M. Ewing Forum,
named in honor of the late editor and publisher of our local newspaper.
He was a worldly and informed man, dedicated to good talk and a lively
exchange of ideas. The forum brings to town a variety of speakers each
year, some of them from the area, others not.

The Finger Lakes
region is a beautiful part of the country. As has often been said, it
runs on water, and as I grew up, there was an increasing realization
that what we have is an invaluable natural resource we could be in
danger of losing. Over the years, the threats have grown ever more
complex with greater hazards revealed as pollution and development have
encroached on the landscape. As a result, much of our audience was
composed of environmentalists and concerned citizens, including a
contingent from We Are Seneca Lake, the grassroots campaign fighting
against the use of crumbling salt mines under the hillsides to store
fracked natural gas and liquefied petroleum gases. (One of its leaders
is biologist, mother and Moyers & Company guest Sandra Steingraber.)

The
conversation with Naomi Klein was billed as “Capitalism vs. The
Climate: Reflections on the 2015 UN Climate Conference,” and while we
certainly spoke a great deal about that recent climate agreement in
Paris, our talk ranged more widely as we discussed her life and work,
politics, the continuing right-wing denial of global warming, and the
climate justice movement.

Naomi Klein is an award-winning journalist, syndicated columnist and author of the bestseller, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism.
She’s a member of the board of directors for 350.org, the global
grassroots movement to solve the climate crisis. Among many other
honors, in 2015 she received The Izzy Award – named after the great
writer and editor IF Stone — celebrating outstanding achievement in
independent journalism and media.

Jewish
alumni and students of Ohio’s Oberlin College say the pro-Palestine
Boycott Israel movement has become a springboard for growing
anti-Semitism.

“Several student organizations at Oberlin have
assumed the role as the mouthpiece of the BDS (Boycott, Divest From, and
Sanction Israel) movement, which claims to be a defender of Palestinian
rights, but whose inflammatory language falsely portraying Israel as an
illegitimate, colonialist and murderous regime demonstrates that its
primary goal is to demonize the Jewish state,” an open letter from
graduates to the school administration says.

The BDS activists are
telegraphing to Jewish classmates that they “either forfeit your
allegiance to Israel and join us, or we will brand you as an enemy of
justice and complicit in the oppression of the Palestinian people.”

Some of their protests have been timed to Jewish holy days:
On Rosh Hashanah, Students for a Free Palestine planted 2,100 black
flags outside of the Oberlin administration office to protest the
casualties in Gaza in 2014 when a fed-up Israel struck back against a
near-daily barrage of rocket fire.The administration has rebuffed the
student anti-Israel demands, including those in a petition from black
students that have equated the struggle of people of color with the
plight of the Palestinians — and was planning to meet the alum who
penned the open letter.

As
the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) “free-trade” agreement was signed
in New Zealand by representatives of the 12 participating countries,
Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders strongly voiced his
opposition and committed to doing what he can to kill the deal if he is
elected president.

Rival Hillary Clinton has also stated opposition to the TPP, but will she also vow to kill it if elected?

Sanders Vows To Kill TPP

Saying
that TPP follows in the footsteps of failed trade agreements like
NAFTA, CAFTA, and Permanent Normal Trade Relations (PNTR) with China,
Sanders promised to “fundamentally rewrite our trade policies to benefit
working families, not just the CEOs of large, multinational
corporations.”He said that supporters of these agreements have
sold them as creating jobs, but over and over again, they have been
proven dead wrong.

President Bill Clinton sold NAFTA in 1993,
saying it would create a million American jobs over a five-year period.
Instead, NAFTA led to the loss of close to 700,000 jobs.

The
conservative Cato Institute said that the trade deal with China would
create far more export opportunities for America than the Chinese.
Instead, the trade deal with China has led to the loss of 3.2 million
jobs, and enormous, humongous and continuing trade deficits with that
country.

Since 2001, nearly 60,000 manufacturing plants in this
country have been shut down and we have lost over 4.7 million
manufacturing jobs. If the workers find new jobs at all, they are
usually lower-paying.

Sanders said at the press conference, “Trade is a good thing. But trade has got to be fair. And the TPP is anything but fair.”

Sanders
vowed to kill TPP if elected, saying, “As your president, not only will
I make sure that the TPP does not get implemented, I will not send any
trade deal to Congress that will make it easier for corporations to
outsource American jobs overseas.”

I
was a licensed naturopathic doctor in two states. I quit practicing
naturopathic medicine after discovering my former boss, also a licensed
ND, had been importing and administering an illegal cancer drug. I
trusted my boss, as did his patients, because he was well respected in
the naturopathic community and his credentials included “FABNO” (Fellow
of the American Board of Naturopathic Oncology). This FABNO treated any
kind of cancer, even in patients who had been discharged by their
medical oncologists. I regret not being concerned that the drug would
arrive at the clinic in packages with foreign postage. My alarm bells
didn’t go off until one day the packages stopped arriving, and my FABNO
boss said, “They were probably confiscated.”

Promptly, I looked up
the substance. It is called Ukrain and is not approved or under review
by the FDA, which makes it a federal crime to import into the U.S. I
confronted my boss, to which he acknowledged his actions were “legally
questionable.” I hired a lawyer, resigned, and filed a complaint to the
state’s naturopathic board.

That evening, a former president of
the American Association of Naturopathic Physicians called and urged me
not to go to the authorities because, in his words, “You are a
naturopath after all.”I felt personally insulted. Were my boss’s
actions meant to go unreported because of a professional philosophy
packaged as an appeal to nature? My interest in being a naturopath
evaporated. I had spent almost 8 years in the naturopathic community. I
went to one of the “best” naturopathic programs and believed that NDs
were primary care physicians. In anguish, I began scrutinizing my
education and training at Bastyr University. What I learned is
frightening.

What is a licensed naturopath?

Naturopaths
are licensed or registered in 17 states, two U.S. territories and D.C.,
as well as five Canadian provinces. Their goal is full licensure with a
scope of practice equal to primary care physicians. Current scopes vary
wildly. In Arizona, an ND is considered a “physician” and can prescribe
controlled substances and perform minor surgeries. In Alaska, an ND is
restricted to providing nutritional advice, counseling, herbs,
homeopathy, and physical therapies.

A licensed ND needs to have
graduated from a program accredited by the Council on Naturopathic
Medical Education (CNME), which is granted programmatic accrediting
status by the U.S. Department of Education. Many, especially NDs, often
confuse CNME accreditation with government endorsement. In fact, CNME
has accrediting power because it meets administrative criteria, not
because the naturopathic curriculum is medically sound. Tellingly,
naturopaths accredit their own programs.

It also promised the agent a cut of the profits.

A
Department of Justice watchdog officially condemned the U.S. Drug
Enforcement Administration this month, following a report that the
agency had recruited a Transportation Security Administration security
screener to search bags for cash that the DEA could confiscate.

The
very existence of such a partnership highlights much broader concerns
about the controversial legal practice known as civil asset forfeiture,
which critics say contorts law enforcement priorities and props up a
system of policing for profit.

In a summary of its investigation,
the DOJ's Office of the Inspector General concluded that the agreement
"violated DEA policy" on a number of levels. While the OIG determined
that the TSA informant never provided any actionable information to the
DEA, it concluded that the plans to pay the agent out of the cash he or
she helped seize "could have violated individuals’ protection against
unreasonable searches and seizures if it led to a subsequent DEA
enforcement action."

In effect, the OIG was questioning the
propriety of an arrangement in which a TSA agent would use his or her
power to tip off the DEA to the presence of cash in travelers' luggage,
and then receive compensation based on how profitable that information
was to the agency.

Robert Everett Johnson, an attorney for the
libertarian public interest law firm Institute for Justice, says the
same criticism could be made about the entire practice of civil asset
forfeiture, which allows law enforcement officials to seize a person's
property -- including cash, cars, jewelry and houses -- without
obtaining a conviction or even charging the owner with a crime.

"This
really is what we see every day around the country -- when law
enforcement takes property using civil forfeiture, law enforcement is
able to keep that property and use it to fund their budgets and in many
cases even to pay the salaries of people who are overseeing the
forfeitures," said Johnson.

"That creates an obvious financial
incentive to take property from people who haven't done anything or
haven't been proven to have done anything wrong. It creates an incentive
for all kinds of abuse," he added.

Many of you are aware of the crisis that occurred two weeks ago at the National LGBTQ Task Force's (Task Force) annual Creating Change conference, which I and many others
have covered at this site and elsewhere. Today I'd like to examine in
greater detail the club used by the radical left to slander and libel
their Jewish compatriots. I call that weapon "pinklying"; they call it
"pinkwashing."

The term "pinkwashing" has been around for awhile,
but has gotten new life thanks to this manufactured crisis at Creating
Change. Kudos to the disruptors for getting the word out -- Creating
Change is now the go-to destination for the young activists who
demand attention and create drama rather than change -- but now they
will have to defend it against an engaged and better-educated
opposition. I will start with the definition used by Sarah Schulman, one of the leaders of the Jewish wing of the BDS movement (her followers are known as "Schulmanites"):

"pinkwashing":
a deliberate strategy to conceal the continuing violations of
Palestinians' human rights behind an image of modernity signified by
Israeli gay life.

So let's do a bit of exegesis on
this definition. I think it's fair to say that most leftist Jews have a
real problem with "the continuing violations of Palestinians' human
rights." I work for a two-state solution because I'm appalled not only
at those human rights violations, but the violation of the core
integrity of the Jewish soldiers asked to carry them out. That my
children's generation feels obligated to carry out those orders causes
me despair. I am very grateful to Breaking the Silence for speaking out on this very issue.

Israel
does have "an image of modernity" because it is a modern state. Denying
that is absurd. Is that modernity "signified by Israeli gay life"? To a
degree, and that "gay life" sets it apart from the Arab world in
general. One should know, however, that while the law in Israel is quite
supportive of LGBT citizens, only 40% approve of homosexuality (though
compared to only 4% in Palestine). The rabbinate, which controls all
family law in the state, is vociferously opposed, and the most extreme
fundamentalist Jews are inciting murderous violence against the queer
population. A Wider Bridge (AWB) exists to build relationships with
organizations like the Agudah and Jerusalem Open House to help them
confront the daily threats to their existence, threats that exist even
in the "modern" state of Israel.

About Me

I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial by strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country.
Thomas Jefferson